Wei Yang, Kidokoro Tetsuo

Keywords： Neoliberalism; Polarization; Urban Divide; Urban Policy; Tokyo

Abstract：

Since the 1970s, neoliberalism has spread from Europe and the United States to the whole world with the process of globalization, and Japan’s urban policies have also been deeply influenced. Firstly, this paper puts forward a hypothesis that the neoliberal urban policy has caused the polarization and urban divide in Tokyo. Secondly, through a national-scale analysis, it has observed that since neoliberalism became the mainstream urban policy in Japan after the 2000s, Tokyo’s concentration trend has accelerated significantly. Meanwhile, the city-scale spatial and policy analysis result reflects that the increasingly urban divide is happening within Tokyo. The analysis tests and supports the validity of the hypothesis proposed in this paper. At the same time, it also finds that urban development policies of Tokyo Metropolitans Government (TMG) as well wards have a strong co-relation with the advancement of gentrification. Finally, we call for urban planning to shift from a neoliberal urban policy to a regional collaborative urban policy, which should be based on a gradual urban renewal-oriented type, rather than the large-scale urban redevelopment. In the current post-neoliberalism, this paper provides a way of thinking about the paradigm transformation of planning theory in China.

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